Postdoctoral Enhancement Awards for Teaching (PEAT)

As Rique Campa shared with us when he visited The Pub Club, there is a new teaching program for postdocs at MSU. Here is the description from Tony Nunez, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Postdoctoral Training: “I am writing to let you know of a new initiative supported by the National Science Foundation, The Great Lakes Higher Education Guaranty Corporation, and The Graduate School at MSU. The purpose of this program is to help postdocs develop a mentored teaching experience and/or to disseminate the results of that experience by presenting a paper or poster at a national conference. This award is meant for postdocs who have participated in the Certification of College Teaching Institute.”

PEAT Program DescriptionThe core aim of this initiative is to enhance the preparation of our Postdocs and Research Associates for academic careers that include teaching and the scholarship of teaching. This mechanism will provide the selected postdoc $1,000 to be used for one or both of these two purposes:

1) To support a mentored teaching experience involving developing and implementing a teaching-as-research (TAR) project.2) To attend a national or regional professional meeting to present a paper or poster based on their TAR project results.

To be eligible for the award the candidate must attend MSU’s 1.5 days Certification in College Teaching Institute and receive the endorsement of the Principal Investigator of the candidate’s research group.

The evaluation of candidates will be done by the senior administrators/faculty of the MSU Graduate School and will be based on a 500-word narrative describing the rationale, significance and approach of the TAR project, accompanied by a detailed budget and budget justification. At the completion of the project, PEAT recipients will also be required to present their projects to the learning community of graduate students of the current cohort of Future Academic Scholars in Teaching (FAST) Fellows or at an MSU Postdoctoral Office activity. To evaluate the impact of the program, the participating postdocs will complete a post-program survey, developed to assess the added value of theprogram to their professional development and preparation as a future faculty member. Data will also be collected from the faculty who serve as their teaching mentor(s) and from the PIs, if they aredifferent from the faculty supervising the teaching-as-research project.

This program will be implemented by Dr. Tony Nunez, Associate Dean, MSU Graduate School and Professor of Psychology/Neuroscience, and Dr. Rique Campa, Associate Dean, MSU Graduate School and Professor of Fisheries and Wildlife. This program is supported by the National Science Foundation, Great Lakes Higher Education Guaranty Corporation, and The Graduate School at MSU.